the partitions at my company end about two feet from the ceiling, so when things in my cubicle are quiet i can hear what's going on in the cubes around me. and sometimes, even when things aren't so quiet, i can hear mike. (his real name, and oh i hope someday he finds this and reads it.) mike is loud. mike is from los angeles. mike studied film at ucla, which (he has loudly claimed from his cell next to mine) has one of the best film schools in the nation. i haven't bothered to check this out; i just tacitly accept that he's lying, the loud, self-aggrandizing bastard. mike has worked (as an intern, he admitted to one questioning student) at pixar, mike doesn't like roppongi, mike thinks that very soon the IT industry will give in to the broadcasting industry and media conglomerates will take over the internet.

it is not these facts and opinions that piss me off so much. (although the one about the internet is kind of annoying, especially since his reasoning for this belief is that people don't like to have choices, that people prefer to be told what they can do and when, and that people also like commercials... oh, and that the main interest of everyone in the IT industry is money, which, seriously, hasn't he ever heard of linux?) it isn't even the fact that he's so loud. it's that he speaks in the most fragmented, moronic english i have ever heard coming from a teacher's mouth.

"where... you go... in tokyo?" one of his students asked the other day. inwardly, i cringed, awaiting his response. i tried to focus on the book in my lap, but his voice was like the scent of rotten fish in a bakery. "i go ebisu. don't like... rop-pon-gi." oh god, i thought. oh god oh god oh god please someone turn the music up i don't care that it's def leppard just turn it up please jesus-- "most of time, though, make mov-ie. an-i-ma-tion? you like... an-i-ma-tion?"

mike talks non-stop to his students about this twelve-minute long animation that he made over the past three years. so far, from what i can tell, he's only suckered one of his students into watching it on his laptop, which he brings into school with him every day and uses to listen to music between lessons. i do not care very much about the music or the fact that he brings the laptop in. and i don't care about the fact that he talks all the time about his animated short. what i care about is that he omits nearly every particle-- articles, prepositions, conjunctions, and others (are there others?)-- when he is talking about it. he often uses the present tense to speak about the past or the future, and in many cases his statements or questions will consist of one word, the 'sentence' type denoted only by inflection. he even omits the 's' at the end of plural words and verb conjugations.

i didn't suspect him of such villainy at first. no, i thought he seemed like a decent guy (if a little bit of an egoist/misogynist-- one of the first sentences out of his mouth was "i've almost had enough of these japanese girls, it's time for me to go back to cali and sell my movie." i think i may have hurt him when i didn't ask him anything more about this 'movie'). after three days of working next to him, though, i began to harbor fantasies of unmasking him for the slacking verbalizer he is. i imagined standing on a chair, poking my head over the partition and saying "hey, mike, don't you mean 'most of the time?' 'most of time' is incorrect, and i really think that you should speak english properly if you're going to teach it. oh, and you're talking about computers, not about 'com-pu-ter.'" then i realized that if his students put up with his awful language they probably wouldn't understand my critique.

next i began to dream about getting him fired. i would call my boss and say "hey, how's it going, do you remember hiring mike? yeah, well, his english is absolutely terrible. no, not when he's talking to me, but when he's talking to his students he sounds like a slightly precocious two-year-old who learned the language using flash cards. yeah. yeah, that's right, haha, good one, like a parrot with a speak-n-spell." then i thought that maybe the students like this method. it is entirely possible that for some low-level students, the exaggerated enunciation and omission of important parts of speech makes for easier learning, or at least makes for the illusion that they are understanding and speaking proper english. i would not want to deprive my boss of the income he makes off of these people. (and i wouldn't want to risk getting fired for complaining about it.)

so today i finally made my move. we finished our last lessons at the same time, and i held the elevator open until he was done hitting on our (engaged) receptionist. "thanks," he said as he slid in. he opened his mouth again to speak but i cut him off.

"what you do... on week-end?" i spoke a little louder than i normally do, partly because i was nervous and partly because we were in a tiny japanese elevator and everything just sounds louder in there.

he looked at me a little funny and mumbled something about working on his movie.

"nice!" i said. "i go to... ha-ra-ju-ku. you know ha-ra-ju-ku? people there... wear costume. dress funny." the doors opened on the ground floor and we walked out. he was looking at me strangely again, as though he knew i was getting at something but he couldn't tell what. "i go now, use com-pu-ter. send e-mail. see you to-mor-row!"

i walked away as fast as i could. at the corner i looked back and he was walking slowly down the sidewalk, shaking his head and staring at the ground.

Here I am, writing my first node in I-don't-know-how-long. I could easily look it up, but I'm too lazy for that sort of thing. Facts are for liberals anyway. HateQuest 2006 inspired me. I have no idea what I am going to write, but I don't want to stop typing until I bang out a few paragraphs.

I'm what is known in the local dialect as a fled noder. I used to be fairly active. I used to write a lot. I mean, look at one of my highest rated nodes - Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - and see that I used to spend some time working on serious nodecraft. But then "it" just left me. What was "it"? "It" was a combination of interest, industry, and eagerness to connect with people out there in the nodegel. One day it was just gone. I figured E2 wouldn't miss me. It will take care of itself.

Then came all sorts of management decisions I didn't personally agree with. And then I noticed a lot of old timers had left too. A day would pass and the New Writeups nodelet would hardly move.

Now I use Wikipedia and E2 with almost equal frequency to look up shit. I use e2 for a more subjective slant. For instance if I wanted to look up XYZ widget for my computer, I would look it up here expecting not just a dry description but also some valuable input like "nice piece of gear but a bitch to install and maintain." Likewise, with new music or movies or books, I will turn here to see what people think because I find I have similar tastes to a lot of noders.

Of course, one could attribute my "fledness" to sour grapes. During my active periods, I semi-actively campaigned to become a content editor. I'm certain that the Management's decision not to so empower me had to do with my low writing frequency and my minimal social interaction on the catbox and/or #everything. Or it could have been that everybody thought my writing sucks, which I can accept. I wanted to be more than just another writer. At one time I really wanted to participate and contribute. For a while I maintained some supernodes, like some of the recipies nodes. But, like everything else I mentioned before, "it" just sort of went away.

Now I don't feel any compulsion to participate in the E2 community in any way. Sometimes I throw a non sequitir into the catbox to get a rise out of people or just to be stupid.

See? Already I have lost interest, so I am going to stop writing now and answer my email.

Hatequest 2006 eh? Fled Noders eh? I have a writeup in violence? Since when? Ok, I feel as if that's enough linking. Back in the day someone started messaging me and telling me all my daylog write ups would be erased unless I used more hardlinks in them, so that nodes that didn't have many softlinks could get some meaningless day attatched to them. Oh noes!

One day I thought about going back to e2 and doing random stuff, but when I contacted most people I knew who were doing it back in "yon day" they basically told me they had little to nothing to do with the whole thing anymore, quote unquote, "Eventually you get tired of a literary circle jerk."

That settled things.

Imagine you have an editor, and imagine that your editor is a gigantic pain in your butt, not because his recommendations are entirely inaccurate, but because everything you write is technically his and not yours and he has the ultimate final say on any creative decisions you might make. Now imagine that everything2 is a place where everyone acts like they are or has powerks akin to an editor. Well, there you have the root of more or less every conflict on e2 ever.

Wikipedia has the exact same problems, but it's superior in that there is a percievable direction in which the site is going. When contributing here you run the risk of having material destroyed for really no reason whatsoever save wimsy. That's all fine and good, and certainly one way to do things, but I find myself more interested in my own desires rather than the desires of others.

Of course things may have changed in the interim,

Or maybe not. I'm not saying this just to be a dick, but word spreads through such channels I do visit and it's like, hm, wow, it's exactly the same as it was however many years ago when I was an active contributor. The difference between then and now is of course experience and wisdom. Also i've gotten laid a lot more since then, so i'm considerably calmer.

First of all, nothing good can come of it unless you consider getting personal and offensive a good thing. There's enough huge egos around this place (at times, mine included) to go around and all I can see is people taking offense and being the subject of drive by downvoting and innuendo just because someone else has got it in for them. That's not what I would call an adult way of going about our business.

Look man, in the GOOD OLD DAYS we were more sly than to downvote people we didn't like. Instead we upvoted and cooled the enemies of our enemies, and oh man, it got to people. Actually that wasn't the intention at the time, but it had a tendency to be percieved as such.

Often times here at E2 we find ourselves bemoaning the fact that we're not attracting new talent and a lot of the old talent is falling by the wayside in ever increasing numbers. Oh, maybe they hang around but you hardly ever see their names on the new write-ups list. That's all well and good and we all come here for our own reasons but when I see only 50 or so users on the user list and half of them have been here only a month or two, something is wrong. If anybody thinks that's the way the way to attract new people then in my ever so humble opinion, they're dead wrong. All it does is encourage some of our newer folks to spew out whatever venom it is they have on their mind. My advice is if you want to do that, go get yourself a blog or possibly a good shrink.

Well, maybe the system is broken. In fact, i'm pretty sure that's exactly whats going on here. Instead of letting everything take care of itself it relies on a core group of editors to decide whats in and whats out. Upvotes, downvotes, and cools are at best a weak guideline. With such a high degree of intervention in writing it's hard to feel as if your work is your own or simply the product of someone elses guidelines. (and no, I don't really care whether or not it's legally someone's work or not.)

I grew up with a skewered view of the world based upon a household that at times seemed to be filled with hate. It left me bitter and uncaring for more years than I care to count. I've worked for the last twenty or so to rid myself of that and I'm still working hard on it every day. It's not the lesson I care to impart on those that are much more important to me than I am.

As a content editor, I'm supposed to be unbiased and judge each w/u on its own merits. In good conscience, I can't say I can do that with anything that would be contributed to this cause. Just the though of it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth and I don't want to play loose with the truth.

It's not that I don't sympathize with you, because I do, but that statement also describes the precise reason why I feel as if any time I spend on e2 would be better spent elsewhere. Unless something is unintelligable, pornographic, copyrighted, plagarized, or otherwise unfit by some very clear guideline, well, I just can't see removing it and still saying that e2 contributes something unique or even particularly interesting to the intranets.

As soon as you do, e2 is just another version of The escapist, wired, or as was derisively pointed out in the past, Slashdot, and it is this way because of the vision and biases of editors contrbituing trimmings of w/u's "on their own merit."

I think I like the general outline of e2 as a database, and I can see things that I would like to do with it, but at the same time I honestly have no interest in the current implimentation and direction of e2, and thats fine, but maybe you ought to start asking yourself exactly who and what the audience is and whether or not this is really the way you'd like to use e2.

I believe I would start by pointing out that my statement is directed at those who have the power of life and death over nodes. However, who are those people, why do they have that power, and does what sort of content does that implimentation generate?